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Presentation Tips

Giving a talk or a poster presentation? Here are some tips to help design it to effectively and convincingly deliver your message!

Themes & Colors

use colors to guide the viewers attention and to organize your material for them
use a consistent color set or theme (tip: you can create your own color theme from scratch or based on an image at http://kuler.adobe.com by registering for free)

click here instructions on how to make your own custom theme in Powerpoint for Mac

avoid using more than a small set of colors...too many and it'll seem disorganized and incoherent
use highly contrasting colors for text/background, but remember what looks visible on your screen won't necessarily look visible once projected

design for people with color-deficiencies...here is an article on how to do so: EOS_20051005_Light_Bartlein_End_of_Rainbow.pdf

Here are some examples of good color palettes for both sequential and categorical data:

Acknowledgements

Maryland logos: (color) (black & white)
NSF logos: (color) (black & white)
FYI, logos have rules for their use. Usually they are supposed to be surrounded by white and a certain minimum size, I think around 1.5 inches. UMD and NSF have guidelines if you google them.

Timing tips -- as a starting point, it is safe to assume it takes 1 minute per slide

Font sizes -- ??Does anyone remember Rachel's guidelines for "don't read me font"??

Slide titles -- one philosophy to consider is having your title be your main point of the slide in sentence form

Organization --

Slide content --

Poster size --

Font sizes -- ??Does anyone remember Rachel's guidelines for "don't read me font"??

abstract -- some viewers prefer having an abstract, so it depends on who your audience is

organization -- guide the viewer along the visual path you would like them to follow, using color, text size, placement, and graphics

Presentation Resources

Here are some places to visit, books to read, and tools to use in designing your talk/poster

books & websites:

a video about Prezi, a cool new presentation program

a video about Kuler for creating color themes: